Nokia Announces 4.5G Pro To Accelerate The Path To 5G

Nokia has announced 4.5G Pro. This technology, it says will help bridge the gap between 4G and 5G. Using Nokia’s Airscale platform, customers will be delivered speeds tenfold of what normal 4G delivers. 5G is not expected to roll out until 2020 but companies like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and Ericsson have begun testing different technologies to get there first.

Nokia’s announcement detailed that 4.5G Pro would deliver speeds of up to ten times that of single carrier channel 4G. Nokia is using carrier aggregation to fuse multiple channels. This technique was recently announced by Verizon in its rollout of “Advanced LTE” speeds across 461 cities in the US. Verizon claimed it could deliver peak speeds of 300 Mb/s by using three channels. Nokia says it will use five channels to deliver speeds of 1000Mb/s or 1Gb/s.

Nokia has already provided 4.5G services to over 90 customers.

Users in the US will be able to take advantage of the 3.5 GHz 4G spectrum for enhanced capacity. And since Band 43 and 42 are now supported, the newly available TDD-LTE spectrum is ready to be utilized.

TDD-LTE was developed by an international coalition of companies including “China Mobile,Datang Telecom, Huawei, ZTE, Nokia Solutions and Networks, Qualcomm, Samsung, and ST-Ericsson”. The technology uses frequencies ranging from 1850 MHz to 3800 MHz and uses a single frequency for uploading and downloading data alternating through time.

To put a cherry on top, Nokia also announced plans to introduce 4.9G. This would build on the 4.5 G Pro technology and fuse more channels together to deliver several gigabits of speed. It would also use cloud based intelligence to reduce latencies to 10ms.

Nokia was quick to remind people that 4G wouldn’t be eclipsed by 5G when it finally arrives in 2020. Even though projections estimate that there will be 24 million 5G customers by 2021, there are around half a billion 4G customers right now and it has taken roughly 7-8 years for that to happen. Granted, 5G will catch on faster than 4G as 4G has caught on faster than 3G but more likely than not, 5G will share space with its predecessor for many years before being permanently phased out.

President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, Samih Elhage talked about the Internet of Things and how 5G will fit into it all. He talked of 4.5G and eventually 4.9G technology providing a “smooth evolution path” to meeting the high data demands in a world run by the IoT. Devices compatible with 4.5G Pro will beging arriving in 2017.

The Internet Blanket

FASTER

In relation to connecting the world through greater internet speeds, more and more companies are jumping in to do their part. Google is already peddling a number of projects like Project Loon and Google Fi and the FASTER undersea trans-pacific cable to bring gigabit speeds to the world. Facebook is testing out its Aquila drone to deliver Internet via lasers to third world countries.

Project Loon

Microsoft and Facebook have teamed up to lay an undersea trans-atlantic cable for faster connectivity too. All this is to eventually lay an Internet blanket of sorts around the world so that these companies can reach more and more customers.

Aquila drone

It may sound invasive, but it’s also essential to bring the IoT to life; something which will benefit the planet in terms of efficiency and progress.